Trip to the Beginning of Time

EARTHKEEPING NEWS
A NEWSLETTER OF THE NORTH AMERICAN COALITION FOR CHRISTIANITY AND ECOLOGY

Volume Eleven, Number Five
July/August 2002

A TRIP TO THE BEGINNING OF TIME

by Guy D'Angelo

After getting a limited response from my congregation to my invitation for an expenses-paid trip to the new Rose Center and Planetarium in New York City, I made the same offer to the Bell AME (African Methodist Episcopal) Zion Church in the neighboring town. The response was very positive. We had enough people for the trip to charter our own train car (and save a bundle of cash). As our group of 20 children and four adults gathered at the train station, we were greeted by the pastor and his fiancee with a bag lunch for everyone, and off we went.

After a short subway ride in New York City, we were at the American Museum of Natural History and the Rose Center. We went first to the African Peoples wing, where we spent the morning learning about the varied cultures of Africa. Even though I had been through this exhibit hall many times, I learned something new that day; namely that Africans were smelting iron ore and making iron tools while Egyptians were still building their monuments with bronze tools!

After lunch, the group toured the Rose Center. As we progressed around the perimeter of the Big Bang theater, we looked at the exhibits taking us from astronomical to sub-atomic distances. We entered the Big Bang theater — a large circular room with a huge convex screen set 3 feet below the floor at its center. We leaned on the railing looking over the screen, the lights went out, and suddenly the voice of Maya Angelou filled the room as the screen depicted the beginning of the universe. After the Big Bang show, the doors opened on the opposite side of the room, and we began our trip down the 200-plus foot spiral of time — all 13 billion years of it.

Each step you take on the way down spans about 20 million years, and every billion years along the way, there is a plaque explaining what was going on in the cosmos at that time. At the end of the spiral, the 30,000 years of human history are represented by a single human hair under a magnifying glass. All of us came away in awe of the vast scope of the cosmos, and even more in awe of its Creator.

We ended our visit in the new Hall of Biodiversity, where we got the bad news about humankind's effect on the planet's ecology and environment. We all came away with a new appreciation of our place in the Universe